The fine and always interesting Australian journal of international writing Contrappasso published four of my poems in its second issue (Issue 2, 2012) and three of my line drawings from my Rogues Gallery of the Insane series. Thanks to editors Theodore Ell and Matthew Asprey for that. Here’s the link to the site http://contrappassomag.wordpress.com/and below is one of the poems.
A Lament on Original Sin
I.
Haloed by caul and born from carnal room
my first suck was a goat’s pap
and the hollow tooth of a bear’s claw
my first and truest spoon
But on the plaster fount of a concrete church,
in the shallow sight of streaked glass —
the pane of skyscrapers –
the red-eyed vision of a traffic light
they circumcised the forepart of Adam’s sin
and awakened the shame of lust in my skin
From that time my smile was a harelip
My mirror reflected a pallor of ash
A reek of molding lie rose from my tongue
and the serpentine specters of Eve’s
recollection
crawled though my sleep like the mildewed streams
on the wallpaper print of tenement rooms
Worms of flesh seethed in my coiled scrotum
I sought the velvet mattress and cushioned buttocks
of blond whores
the neon blight of corner bars
Eve’s pant was a bellow in my ear
and nerves of sulfur smoke branched through my brain
But how the green bile of gall vomited
from my spleen
at these copulations in dark closets
and at the spasms of other guilt-hunched men
who, in the chinked lids of my sight,
hid
under temple roofs
as corrugated
as the wrinkled limbs of their sin
How could we stucco these walls of vermin wood?
these unblessed halls of public good?
and succumb in a weather of pious stench,
safe as the superstitious stains of our souls
our lives a testament of Christless fraud?
II.
My soul creaked like a swollen bladder of holy water
I sought the salvation of men
with my locked knee
So I quit the plaza for the clean air
journeyed to the desert of Judea
in crepe and weeds
longing for locusts and wild honey
ran with the bush-tailed fox and the jack-rabbit
sweated under the prickly shade of cactus
communed with the sand-sun
cast my sperm on desert rock
to the congo beat of my penitent pulse
under a blood moon
And on the fortieth day
red-boned and black of foot
took the martyr’s trek to the city wall
under a cross of stars
the glowing moon of Christ’s redemption
III.
Yet, brows of shadow dimmed the bone crevice
of my eye
its glint of religion
comb-waved heads rippled from my path
like the red sea
They feared the nettle-clot of my long-stranded hair
the goat-hide stench of my loin cloth
the burnished bones of cheek and hip
the lank bronze of bicep and thigh
For how could a savage reach a seer’s height
with the civilized?
and my prayers reverberated in my chest
like the percussive thump of enemy boots
in the evening gloom
There was an edge of teeth in my cry:
“Oh, unstitch the thorns from His knitted lips
for Paul froths in an epileptic spit
And down a gauntlet of their blue-coated
billy-clubbed peace officers
hooded vigilantes
I was driven
droopbacked and blinded by their sentinel stones
IV.
And now in the loud night and silence
of isolation
in the mistrusting glare of a coyote’s stare
the cap of my knees
in dark-root dirt
my shoulder rubbed by pine bark
and the omen hoot of an owl in my ears
I ask my Father”
Can I repair that rent in my chest
while it is concealed by a cloak’s fold?
Are men so stricken by those dark veins
of sediment
that rise to the surface of their sallow loins
those dull hints of doom
they dumb the healer in a hermit’s cell?
Or do I brood on the stinging flesh
to the detriment of a springtide air?
Am I to be just the missionary of my own soul?
the scourge of its speckled blot
only witness to my outcaste’s Golgotha?
drink solo from the pumping vessel of grace
in my chest?
Serve thee, Father, by standing sullen
while each man suffers the folly of his own pain
and redemption?
achieves his own salvation
–whether in fogged air
or under the sheltering dome of a cathedral?
If this is thy will, Father
and I have tread a fool’s path
then, Father, in thy name, Father,
ease these bitter constrictions of memory
and artery
tangled in my heart, parasites and host,
ease the throttling muscle in my throat
the glare of my chalk eye
Let this right hand bind the fist of the left
let them clasp palms from fingernail to lifeline
let them suffer the odor and salt
of mutual sweat and crossed thumbs
Father! in the name of the Father!
let me forgive myself and men
Floyd Salas